"Looking Bad"

In 1983 Eddie Becker, Karen Ranucci, Joan Braderman, Skip Blumberg, Joel Kovel and I went to Nicaragua as the US threatened to attack. We thought it would be similar to the assault that was perpetrated against the island nation of Grenada that fall. Everyone expected that there would be a similar military invasion and we went down to try to show that what was happening in Nicaragua was supported by many of the Nicaraguan people and also many U.S. citizens who lived and worked there.

The resulting film is called Waiting for the Invasion: US Citizens in Nicaragua. Although many people all over the world expected an immediate invasion, we were wrong.  The invasion came, but not in the form of a full-out military assault.  Reagan unleashed a bloody U.S.-funded and trained counter insurgency that ruined the Sandinista economy and killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguan peasants.

Before we finished the film, we tried to get portions of it shown on the MacNeil Lehrer Report on PBS. We were quite desperate to get the information to a wider audience to try to stave off what we saw as an impending invasion. We knew that PBS would want full "journalistic neutrality" so we were careful to interview people from "both sides". But it was hard to find people who supported the notion of a U.S. invasion. Even a U.S. ex-military entrepreneur tire salesman wearing a California Chamber of Commerce tee shirt was against an invasion. We interviewed him as he was digging a trench outside of his business saying he would be "ready for Reagan".

We did finally found a pro-invasion spokesperson-- the U.S. Ambassador, Anthony Quintain, who railed against the peaceniks who had gathered in front of his embassy with their peace signs. We also interviewed the Texaco oil man in Managua, whose swarmy interview was full of hostility towards those protesters who "must live in a box", to be brought out for protests by the devious communists running the country.

It was 1983 and it was before the many brigades of U.S. "sandalistias" descended on the revolutionary experiment with their cameras and tape recorders. We had pretty much "an exclusive" with our look inside the Sandinista Revolution.  MacNeil Lehrer kept our film clips for several weeks and a friend who worked with them said they were seriously considering running some of our footage. But ultimately we were turned down.  The opinion from the PBS management (we heard that the issue had gone up the chain of command to Washington executives) was that it was "too one-sided".

"But wait!" we objected. "We did show both sides! We interviewed the ambassador and the oil company!" "Yes," said the producer, "but they look bad. Nothing they say makes any sense." So because it was so obviously "one-sided", our film never ran on PBS. It did, however, run in the Iowa State Fair. A solidarity group picked our film to loop continuously at a booth the next summer. One of the scenes takes place in a cornfield where a young U.S. agronomist speaks about the agrarian reform program and the need to get away from export-only farming and plant more food products.  The Iowa peace group said they looked at a lot of films about conflict in Nicaragua and Central America and they felt that our film was the only one that Iowa farmers could relate to.  Corn farmers unite.

Burning History

Ken Burns' doc on WWII is playing as I write this. His sentimental gung-ho-for-war film comes just in time to rev up the sagging military support in this country.

All the discussion about the series I have read has been about what was left out--i.e. Latinos, Native Americans and women. But looking at the series now, I wonder why anyone would ever want their history to be included in that war mongering schlock. Oh, I know that it will be used by a generation of junior high school teachers as the definitive view of the war, but the whole series should be protested, not just the affront to Latinos and women.

Eric Beitbart wrote a detailed critique: "The Burns Effect". It was written about a documentary about Andy Warhol, but as his son Josh says: but the first half is a thoroughgoing critique of the entire Burns body of work and its impact on documentary
filmmaking." It's at: http://cat.middlebury.edu/~nereview/Breitbart-Burns.html

If you want to see a more incisive look at WWII go to The Battle of San Pietro, John Huston's film (public domain) which has been posted on archive.org Although commissioned by the US gov to provide propaganda for the war, Huston's searing film was so disturbing, initially the Defense Department wouldn't let it be shown. As my friend filmmaker Cambiz Khosravi has pointed out, one of the things completely missing from Burns' epic is any reflection on the role of the cameramen in the war and the use of their images in period newsreels.

In fact, some of the footage is used to represent places and times which are not accurate. It is not error. It is deliberate. I am on a Visual Anthropology list and received this from Jay Ruby, one of the founders of that field:
"Ken Burns' latest epic "The War" (World War II) is currently being broadcast on the U.S. public TV network. He is routed as "Mister Documentary Film" in the states. Since his first epic series on the U.S. Civil War I have been extremely uncomfortable with his misuse of photographs. I have heard him say in a public forum that it does not matter to him if the photo is actually a portrayal of what he implies it is as long as it "looks" good and fits into his storyline. As scholars of the image this should bother us a lot and yet I can find almost no criticism of his work. Am I missing some critics that I should read?"

I am fairly familiar with military footage from the Caribbean and Central America which I researched for both my films Haiti; Bitter Cane and The Gringo In Mañanaland. In one of the segments in The War, there was footage of Marines in training. I know that footage-- it was from the 1920s in Haiti! I recognized the parade ground in Port Au Prince and had seen that footage at San Bernadino Air Force Base years ago when Marine footage was stored there. It is fairly easy to identify such footage. I guess Burns and his "historian consultants" don't really care.

At the end of each episode, the corporate "moments" come on. PBS can't call them commercials and still be a "non commercial" network. The Anheuser Busch "moment" is a shot of their iconic horse drawn beer wagon crossing paths on some desert road with a group of humvees and troop trucks. The troops wave at the teamsters with jolly hellos. As they pass a text come up saying as best as I can remember it, "We salute those who serve."Here're some excerpts from a piece in The Hollywood Reporter called Big Sponsors Flank "War" by Gail Schiller:

...."For the corporate partners, the association with "War" and Burns is an image builder.

"A program like this, given its content and subject matter, allows us to create a serious and emotional connection with our customers when they know we're getting behind preserving a seminal moment in our history," said Rena DeSisto, arts and culture executive for Bank of America.

Bank of America is promoting "War" with tune-in messaging on its Web site, the checking statements of its customers -- who number 57 million -- and on its 17,000 ATM screens nationwide. Bank of America also has purchased outdoor media in Boston, New York and its hometown of Charlotte, N.C., and print ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and Newsweek.

Anheuser-Busch is promoting "War" with vignettes on the company's Times Square digital display and on Budweiser.com and with advertising on Budweiser delivery trucks, signage in its theme parks and with the special edition Budweiser can and packaging. Bank of America and Budweiser also are sponsoring premieres in the four towns where the veterans are interviewed in the docu. And Bank of America is sponsoring a New York gala premiere Sept. 17 at the Museum of Modern Art.

GM is buying print ads in the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal and Automotive News and radio ads on XM Satellite Radio and in six spot markets including Los Angeles, Miami and Washington. The automaker also is running online banner ads on GM.com beginning Sept. 22 and sponsored a screening of the film with Burns for more than 400 guests at the Library of Congress in June.

"Ken has sort of become America's historian, and at GM we feel it's an advantage for us to be associated with these stories of the American experience because of our position in society and our place in American popular culture, even though none of the films has been about GM at all," said Ryndee Carney, manager of advertising and marketing communications for GM.

In additional to all its traditional media buys, PBS on Sept. 1 began running ads for the docu in more than 4,300 movie theaters nationwide. It is distributing bingo cards branded with "The War" to bingo halls and postcards with tune-in messaging to Jewish community centers, American Legion halls, Veterans of Foreign Wars organizations, VA hospitals, Shriners and Rotary Clubs in PBS' 16 media markets. PBS also is targeting college students with posters in history departments on 300 campuses."
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Here is a comment I received from UCSD:
I'm a new grad student in the Comm Dept with a background in documentary film and video production. Two nights ago, I watched about 20 minutes of The War before I turned it off. I'm not going to watch the rest of it, and I certainly hope it doesn't "rev up the sagging military support in this country." I have faith that more people are watching Grey's Anatomy and American Idol.

The "publicly acceptable" portrayal of America's military past--beyond WW II--has disturbed me deeply since the 9/11 attacks. I've been working on a doc video for years now about men who reenact battles from the Revolutionary War in New England, a topic I was drawn to after I went to see a reenactment of the Battle of Lexington in 2002. The post-9/11
patriotic buzz was in the air, and somehow, the press played the story of the 1775 encounter as a parallel to that 2002 moment: innocent Americans died, so others had to avenge their deaths to preserve the land of liberty.

The Pearl Harbor segment (the bit that I saw) of The War played the same mythic storyline.

I don't doubt that Burns may actually agree with this overall theme, but I do wonder how much control over content PBS corporate sponsors hold over the project. Understanding the past and selling something new have always
been at odds, it seems to me. I can't imagine that beer companies want their product associated with anything but the most PG of veterans. I read a review in the New Yorker about how sanitized this series was--practically no cursing in a 15 hour series about men killing each other. Makes me wonder what else he left out and why...
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AND THESE ARE OTHER COMMENTS FROM THE VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY LIST:
"In general, what bugs me more than anything is that PBS has been dedicating weeks of time to several films about WAR...... part of US media campaigns to keep US citizens in a rah rah mood to support the Iraq war. The "support the troops while they continue to die for what?" campaign is raising the pressure all over the country. "

Yes, it's about Iraq, but perhaps more for revving up the country for the imminent invasion of Iran.

and another thought from the list: "There's a great thesis: Does the Ken Burns "style" of using visual media with little or no reference to historical or political context (perhaps even blatant disregard for it), and the use of this tool to glorify war, and elicit emotional response to that glorification in his public television audience, actually work to depoliticize things like war in a time of war, by hyping the glory of war (in a sensitive and respectful way, of course!)"

PBS at the Crossroads

Last night I saw a few moments of a back lit Richard Perle in the most infuriating piece of Bush propaganda that PBS has ever devised, America at the Crossroads. (sic-- once again we see the US referred to as "America") The New York Times reviewed the Perle segment yesterday. Danny Schecter tells me that the series was one of Michael Pack's projects. Pack, who headed the Corporation for Public Television formerly directed Worldnet, a service of the U.S. Information Agency, then parent of the Voice of America. So I guess he was well versed in producing propaganda. I think the media reform community needs to address the whole issue of so-called "public media"-- both PBS and NPR. My friend Tony says that PBS is beyond hope. I know there are many who think that way. We might not be able to really change it, but making an effort to struggle would clarify issues around the whole notion of "public interest".
Years ago I was part of a struggle to "make public television public". Here are some of the documents from that 70's battle.There was even an article in TV Guide.Channel 13, WNET TV's license was challenged by a New Jersey coalition. WNET is licensed in New Jersey and hardly ever has paid attention to that state. We challenged the whole structure of financing which gave control of program content selection to corporations. My own role was as President of Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, demanding greater funding and channel space for independent and diverse productions.We demanded that the boards of public television stations be elected and that all board meetings (including committee meetings) be open to the public.The struggle was picked up by a British magazine, which covered the "row" over millions of CPB/PBS dollars going to the BBC for a Shakespeare series. That issue brought major labor support for our cause. The AFL-CIO testified with us in Congressional hearings. That's me at the Steinbeck. Our coalition included the Consumer Federation which issued its own position paper. Warren Brarren was our liason.There were demands for public interest satellite space, which was finally won with 4% of DBS funding in the 1990s and which has meant space for Freespeech TV, Link TV and many universities, such as the University of California.The CFA also demanded that commercial broadcasters pay a fee for use of public airwaves. Of course, instead, they are now the recipients of the biggest give-away in communication history.The New York Times took up the cause of independent production.But the trade paper, Show Business, understood that the struggle was for control, not crumbs. The battle had many fronts. There was a law suit by the Emergency Civil Liberties Union. After years of lobbying and demonstrations, independents did get language in the public broadcasting legislation that said "a substantial portion of production funding should go to independent producers". Although it would take years before a mechanism for that was established: ITVS the Independent Television Service, which funds productions for public television.Perhaps the most important victory of our coalition was legislation requiring all public television boards of directors (any entities receiving CPB(Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the funding mechanism) be open to the public. That includes committees, except for personnel committees. This opening has not been adequately used. For example, groups around the country could go to their local PTV (or NPR) station's board meetings and demand that Democracy Now! be broadcast in their community. Or young people could demand that programming that address their issues be developed. Or seniors. Or health care advocates. Or people who object to the sort of blatent propaganda that the Crossroads of America represents could ask for equal time. To read more about that series, see Gary Kamiya's article on Salon at:http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/04/17/crossroads/